


You will never find a greater hive

by Oriki-Miitad (Sneaking_UnicornWitch)



Category: Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe of an Alternate Universe, Beekeeping, Gen, Gratuitous Beekeeping, Humor, Rogers being Rogers, Star Wars AU - Soft Wars, Suspect Droid Anatomy, This Would Be Crack Anywhere But Soft Wars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-13
Updated: 2021-02-13
Packaged: 2021-03-13 18:33:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29406291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sneaking_UnicornWitch/pseuds/Oriki-Miitad
Summary: A year on Concord Dawn, told through the photoreceptors of one Bees Roger of Vode.
Comments: 15
Kudos: 48
Collections: Open Source Soft Wars





	You will never find a greater hive

**Author's Note:**

> I make no apologies whatsoever for the title!
> 
> This all takes place in Projie's Soft Wars. The Rogers who defect, including Roger the Beekeeper, are first found in [Ceasefire](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23606308).

**Spring**

The rhythmic sound of a hammer on metal into soft wood fills the stuffy room, hot with midday solar gain. 

Top bar and sides together, tack tack tack, 

Roger's cooling system is efficient for another few hundred degrees, but it's obviously too much for the two menaces who had offered to help. They had quickly abandoned the job and wandered off in search of cool drinks and shade. No stamina, these organics.

Pin the bottom pieces on, tack tack tack, 

Last year they’d made up the frames outside, but the bees had been drawn to the scent of the wax. And honestly, that wouldn’t have been an issue, had he not run inside his neighbours’ house to try to avoid the growing number of curious little bees. Who had then been followed by all of their… _vode_ , Roger supposes. 

Put the wax in the frame, fold the wires in,

This year the grumpy one had offered the use of their large sunroom, shut off from the outside with panes of thick transpariplast. He had tried to refuse, because apparently that’s what you do the first time someone offers something, according to the manual that Roger Who Grows Flowers found. But then the bouncy one had said that Wolffe’s offer wasn’t an offer, not really. Roger thinks if that’s what they meant they should say it. 

Final piece of wood to hold the wax on, tack tack tack,

Knocking together the frames is therapeutic in a way that eases his servoprocessor, a gentle repetitive task that he can make obvious progress on. Roger likes making things with his hands. It makes such a difference to killing things with them.

Put the frame in the brood box, prepare the parts for the next one.

Wolffe’s two menaces come back in, each with a glass of something chilly, poking and prodding at each other in a way that is entirely foreign to him and his droid counterparts. Hardcase says that touching people shows you like them but that if someone doesn’t want to be touched you should respect that.

Roger isn’t sure if he likes to be touched yet, but that’s okay. They say he can find out in time. 

**Summer**

When they’d first got a hive together one of the clones had asked if the beekeeper would need a suit. Roger had said that he didn’t. The bees can’t sting him, and it would hurt them more than him even if they did.

It makes it very handy when the bees swarm, or he has to transport them. The first time a clone - one of the grumpy one’s _brothers_ , Gree - had been at the farm and had seen Roger with a manipulator entirely covered in bees he’d run away. He’d come back out wearing a heavy coat and helmet despite the heat, and had spent the rest of the afternoon asking Roger about his hives and taking holos of the swarm and the queen. 

However, Roger thinks, it’s at times like these - times where he’s having to gently chivvy bees out of his vocabulator without hurting any of them - that he thinks maybe just a veil might not be such a bad idea after all. 

He scrapes off the wax that the bees have begun to deposit on top of the frames using the hive tool which the grumpy one had made him. He could slip it on instead of his usual hand, and it was exceedingly useful for hive maintenance. 

Wolffe had given it over with only a minimal amount of grumpy fussing, gruffly said “made you this” like it hadn’t taken time to research and plan and construct. By now it was a little stained, covered in propolis, but Roger treated it with care and loved his little subroutine of attaching it before he went out to work on the bees. 

One of the supers is full, so it’s with a brace of his knees that he lifts the whole weighty box off of the hive stand and onto a waiting hoverbarrow ready to extract. His digits are sticky, and he knows he’s going to need to clean off before he even thinks about getting an oil bath. Closing up the hive he runs through the processes he’ll need for extraction day, what his friends might think of the taste of this year’s batches. 

The honey from the first year had received... mixed reviews. Stance had said it tasted like tibanna, and Cut had said he’d had rotgut taste less good. As Roger hadn’t ever tasted either of those things, hadn’t eaten any honey, and was - in fact - incapable of taste at all, he had figured it couldn’t have been that bad if they were still speaking to him. 

But since then all of them have been busy. Farms now grew crops, rather than the dense undergrowth and huge trees that were on the planet naturally. The area that Roger kept the majority of his hives on had been planted with so many different flowers by Roger Who Grows Flowers. So it stood to reason that the honey would taste different. Perhaps less tibanna-y, even.

A clone called Bacara, who sometimes came down to the farm with the yellow-topped one, had said he should speak to someone called Lickit when he’d tried some of that first batch of honey.

Everyone had laughed, so Roger had too, but he wasn’t sure why.

**Autumn**

Roger hums a little something from the back of his memory core as he goes through the hives for their last weekly check before the weather turns. He’s sure if he worked hard he could remember the words, he’d not run a defrag routine for a while, but he is pretty sure the lyrics are about killing ‘clankers’. The tune’s nice though.

Each of the frames gets checked for any sign of Pantoran Foulbrood before lowering them back down into the brood box. Some bees still buzz around him lazily despite the smoke he puffed in not too long ago. Threep is his most docile hive, and he chats to the bees as he works his way through the frames, about the goings on of his neighbours and what the rest of the Rogers are up to. It’s on the very last frame that he spots the marked queen bee or - as he likes to call her - the Bee’Alor, safe and well. 

Not many of the big animals get too close to the farm, a heavily used explosives range scares off most things that use their circuits sensibly, but every so often a treestalker decides that what it really needs to get through the colder months is a whole load of honey and bees.

Roger’s processor had felt very wobbly the first time it happened. The bees hadn’t deserved to be destroyed like that. They were individual organic units, each one special, albeit very small.

To try and stop it happening again he’s got grav-webbing to wrap around the hives, hopefully a deterrent enough to put off hungry jumpscares and the like. It holds the hives firmly down to the ground, stops them from being so easily ripped into.

Roger hadn’t had to worry about looking after anything else before the Jedi had given them a choice, everything had been strictly regimented and there’d been no programming to take care of another droid. 

Now though, he gets some very static-y feelings when he looks through the bees, and he’s fairly sure it’s not because some of them have got into his chest cavity - again. It’s a sense of fulfillment, he supposes, to look after something that can’t take care of itself. Not because of what it can give you - Roger doesn’t eat the honey and he doesn’t use the wax - but because it’s the right thing to do. 

The grumpy one had given Roger a wet sort of look when he’d mentioned it.

**Winter**

It’s bitterly cold on Concord Dawn this time of year, so much so that Roger’s servomotors freeze up if he’s out too long. Although one enterprising Roger has set up a clothing line for them all, he’s not actually made the time to get any yet. He’ll go soon. Rogersix has a hat with a bobble on it, which looks very nice.

Suu had said that it wasn’t good for animals to be outside when it’s so cold, and the eopies at the Lawquane farm were being kept sheltered in a barn. So Roger had wanted to stop his hives from getting too cold. But the bees themselves had shown their displeasure quite firmly when he had tried to bring them inside his house. Rogersix hadn’t been impressed either.

There was now a firm ‘no bees in the house’ rule, both at his own house and also at the farm.

In the warmer months Roger didn’t have to feed the bees, they did that themselves with the pollen and nectar they gathered. Yet they still needed someone to take care of them, to keep them free from disease and manage their numbers. And, while there’s less to do with the bees in the winter, Roger still feeds them and makes sure their numbers are high enough that they can survive the cold.

He can feel his motors begin to seize up, and takes a diagnostic. He’s almost finished with this last hive, and should still be within operational parameters once he’s finished. Roger sets up the feeder, fills it full of sweet polysucracarb and lines up the holes in the duraplast with those in the crownboard, before using his thermosensor to check that the internal hive temperature is still optimal. Thankfully it is, although the work involved in merging two hives will always be preferable to losing both of them. It’s one piece of programming he’s not had to rethink since he came to Concord Dawn.

He’d always wanted to raise bees, long before he’d been free to make his own choices. He’d thought they were the most understandable and droid-like of organics. They had jobs, and routines, and signals. One bee was in charge, and that was the way it should be (Roger could remember when they got rid of Control Ships and everything got very messy). Through time, though, he’s come to the realisation that even though they are indeed industrious and efficient, bees are just as wonderfully confusing as everything else - and that’s the way he likes it.

He can’t eat their honey, but he likes their simple company, the work with his hands. He likes sharing with friends.

Yes, Roger really quite enjoys keeping bees.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on tumblr [here](https://oriki-miitad.tumblr.com/), come say hi!
> 
> No one knows if Threep hive is named after C-3PO or Threepwood and they're all too scared to ask.


End file.
